Introduction
CENTRUM Pucp is a Business School located in Lima-Peru stablished since 2000 with the support of Pontifical Catholic University Peru (Pucp its acronym in Spanish). It ́s accredited by AACSB, EQUIS, AMBA and BGA. In 2022 it has around 3000 active students in its degree programs MBA, other specialized Masters and DBA. It has a presence in 10 cities in Peru. Most of its programs are part time. The students in CENTRUM are over 26 years old, the average age is 32 years old, the have an average of 4 years of work experience, by profession its students are mostly in the area of administration, management and engineering.
The new motto of CENTRUM is: “We Educate in Business for a Better World”that responds to the School’s interest in reinforcing in our students a humanistic education with and sustainable and ethical social sense that is aligned with the SDGs. For this purpose, since three years ago the new academic plan for the MBA program include co-curricular activities that are a complement to the comprehensive formation that our students receive. Among these offer is an elective short course: Business Human Rights that has been offered online 4 times since 2020 in which 128 MBA students have participated with an average NPS of 77.16 it is important to highlight that it is a free choice course and consists of 5 modules that aims is to bring the reflection of Human Rights closer to the business practices and identify the role of companies for their adequate protection.
Collaboration with IDEHPUCP
A Strength for CENTRUM is being part of a university that has multidisciplinary units, in this case the BHR course is chair by professors from the Institute of Democracy and Human Rights (IDEHPUCP) academic units of PUCP. The increasing growing relevance of incorporating a Human Rights approach in Business activity has made possible this collaboration for the training of our MBA students. In our national and regional context there are multiple challenges of attention around BHR that need different perspectives of approach to find best practices.States in Latin America have wide gaps in economic, social and cultural inequality among their citizens, in such a way that the aspects related the BHR are mainly related to pay attention to the rights of socially vulnerable groups (discrimination, evidenced in fewer opportunities for native communities, indigenous people, sexual diversity, people with disabilities and refugees); high percentage of labor informality, high rates of child and youth labor; low conditions for labor unions; social conflicts due to extractive activities and environmental protection, among other.
Future Expansion
In the future, we hope to continue strengthening the BHR formation track in the co-curricular offer expanding it to specialized masters and executive education and including new methodologies that adapt to the possibilities of our students. Since it is in the interest of CENTRUM to increasingly incorporate the importance of the Responsible Business Behavior into the students’ reflection and involve more of the society in these issues in which greater interest is required from private institutions.
